Cast Me Gently Into Morning
by KitSparrow
Summary: Some hurts take longer to heal than others. Zoe dreams and mourns and tries to cope. Warning! Spoilers for the BDM!


**Title:** Cast Me Gently into Morning  
**Author: **Kit Sparrow  
**Summary:** Some hurts take longer to heal than others. Zoe dreams and mourns and tries to cope.  
**Rating:** PG  
**Characters:** Zoe (with mentions of everyone else)  
**Pairing:** Zoe/Wash  
**Type:** Uh... Somewhere between Gen and Het, I guess...  
**Warning:** Spoilers for BDM, for allusions to marital relationships and feminine biological functions.  
**Spoilers/Timeline:** Post Serenity  
**Disclaimer:** They're all Joss and Universal's, excepting the planet Prometheus, which I made up, and the title, which comes from Sarah McLachlan's "Answer".  
**Author's Note:** That summary is crap. I started writing this... the second time I saw Serenity (basicly the second day it was in theaters). By now there are probably a good twenty dozen of these, but it took me a while to get it where I liked it; I first posted it on my livejournal and a couple of fanfic journals in April and I'm still not quite sure on the ending. But hey, first Firefly fic. First fic in a good long time too. 1357 words.

Zoe dreams of blue-eyed babies, dusky skinned children with laughter on their lips. Sometimes she dreams they are on the boat, running from cockpit to engine room, forever underfoot. They make forts of the dining room table and help Kaylee fix engine parts, watch Simon patch the crew, their tiny hands and noses smudging the glass windows. They play hide and seek with River in the cargo-bay and Captain pretends to be annoyed but he laughs when he thinks they aren't looking. Inara teaches them to write in a dozen different languages, Jayne occasionally remembers to be polite in the presence of innocent ears. Zoe herself teaches them to aim and shoot. Book tells them fables of Earth That Was while he deftly braids their unruly hair. Wash steers with a baby in his lap, mindful to keep small fingers away from the buttons. She dreams she finds her husband and child both asleep, clutching plastic dinosaurs.

Sometimes they live in Haven or on Shadow, as it used to be, or even Prometheus, Wash's home planet. Zoe teaches her children to ride. They oversee the work on a dream-restored Shadow ranch and walk out of a setting Haven sun into a sprawling ranch house whose door fluidly leads to a small, messy Promethean apartment like the one Wash's parents live in. She finds her husband and his parents eating around the low main room table, pieces of various projects scattered around the floor pillows in every direction. Her dream children run to greet their father and grandparents, chattering excitedly about their day.

He looks up at her and smiles that soft, sweet smile of his and for a moment she is overcome with joy and peace at the sight. She lingers in the doorway, then sinks to her knees on a floor pillow next to her man. The other people in the room vanish with the forgetfulness of dreaming and she wraps him in her arms, kisses him hesitantly, then insistently. Her fingers tangle in his soft sandy hair and she cannot keep from staring into his blue, blue eyes.

This is often when she wakes up, just when she can feel his hands on her back, his arms around her, just taste his soft, sweet lips. The bed next to her is too wide and empty and cold, their room too dark, the ship too silent even with the ever-present hum of engine and life-support.

She finds it difficult to remember the time before they married, when it was normal to wake up and not have him beside her-- when she would have gutted him for just being in her room. But what scares her most these days is the times when she can't quite remember certain details about him; scents have faded from their room and with them have gone contours, scars, wrinkles, low laughs and gentle smiles from her mind. His eyes remain, but his face is blurring. She isn't sure if she should be healing by letting these memories drift away or gripping them tightly, hoping they do not escape like smoke through a grabbing hand.

Her body is less forgetful than her mind; it betrays her, reaching to touch an absent shoulder, to take a missing hand, aching to kiss and be held. Sometimes Zoe wakes to find herself hugging the extra pillow more tightly than he'd ever have borne, searching for a familiar scent there is no remaining trace of.

She has not allowed herself any sentimentalities. The crash tossed everything about, strewing furniture, clothing, appliances, toys, everything in all directions. When the crew was finally able to pick up the ruin of their home, Zoe found the bed upside down on the other side of their small bunk. No point in leaving the last sheets he slept on when the entire bed had to be reassembled. Nor was their any point to keep his clothes; too small for the Captain or Jayne, nothing Simon would ever wear. She packaged it all up for a drop off next place might need them. The dinosaurs and such she sent to his sister and her children on Prometheus; toys need playing with and no one on the boat is likely to do that now. His flight school medals and awards, various other shinies, and his graduation uniform were sent to his parents. There were a few days when she considered moving into the long-disused extra bunk, to get away from their home. But that room, a storage space filled with junk the last few years, was his when he first joined up, back when something about him bothered her and she thought herself well past loving.

No one besides the Captain seems to know what to do now, how to treat her. They're all familiar with death, but none so much as Zoe and the Captain. Even Jayne's never lost someone he was really close to, let alone two in almost one go and nearly a hundred others who weren't even involved. She knows they are missing all their lost friends and allies keenly, but when she isn't thinking of Wash, she is wishing Book had still been there to see her husband off and that he was here now to bring them all some of his peace. Even though the preacher's room was empty for months before, the crew still seem to find themselves heading there when they need comforting. Kaylee looks close to breaking sometimes when Simon leaves her alone long enough to really think. Simon doesn't seem much better himself, still too used to antiseptic death brought on by illness or age. Inara always has something to say about death being just another part of life, but she's obviously shaken and looking forward to distancing herself from this. River is still dealing with being able to think clearly for the first time in three years. Zoe is gratified when the girl finds some monster glue and takes the remaining miniature palm trees and dinosaurs hostage, refusing to see them removed from the bridge. Neither of them say anything about it after that though. Beyond this she feels cut off from the others and unsure if she wants to or can share in their grief.

The Captain knows not all is well with Zoe, but he also knows better than to probe further when she says she'll fly true. He believes, probably rightly, that in time she will find her feet again. For now she tries to run on default, numbing herself to the pain as she works to accept and move on. The brief hysteria after the crash was more than she'd let out since before Serenity Valley.

She has never been the crying type, preferring to take action than play the uselessly distressed damsel. It was close when she was finally able to wave his parents; telling the tale and seeing them both fall apart was almost harder than burying him. But she has only cried once: the first time she bled after the crash. She had expected to of course, but it was a crushing blow, the last of her faint, fantastic and illogical hope that she might have been left something of her blue-eyed boy. Logically, she knows she could not face raising his child now, but grief has no sense. The cold, withdrawn, sensible part of her mind works to keep that grief in check all day as she drives herself to exhaustion before finally finding refuge in sleep.

Zoe dreams of blue-eyed babies; dreams of Shadow and Prometheus and Haven and Serenity. She dreams of Wash and how he finally won her over, cooly navigating the stars, smiling with an innocence untainted by war or disappointment or death, animatedly telling stories. He was always jealous of the war-stories, but he had thousands of his own, all always brightly, brilliantly told. She dreams of the first time she realized just how blue his eyes were and why exactly she caught him watching her so often. She dreams of love and for a while she forgets desolation.

_fin._


End file.
